Rocker Neil Young wanted to see for himself the damage from ExxonMobil’s ruptured Pegasus oil pipeline, which recently spewed reeking, black goo into small-town Mayflower, Ark. So Young, a stalwart environmentalist, drove his revamped, super fuel-efficient hybrid 1959 Lincoln Continental into Mayflower on Monday, unannounced.

A few people snapped pictures with Young (local blogger Shelli Russell bumped into a telephone pole while chasing him down). But regardless of how cool his car is, it’s unlikely the famous singer got into the Northwoods neighborhood, where the pipeline ruptured. Round-the-clock security patrolmen still have the place tightly guarded for ExxonMobil, as they have from the beginning of the spill when it seemed the town was under martial law.

On his brief journey, Young undoubtedly saw crews without respirators working in an area locals call the Cove. They are hard to miss. The Cove — along with nearby Lake Conway, a popular fishing and boating spot — has become a point of contention in Mayflower.

ExxonMobil has insisted that it stopped the oil from seeping from the Cove into Lake Conway. But Mayflower residents and environmental activists say they smell something fishy, and it’s not in the lake. It is a scheme by ExxonMobil to make everything look copacetic, when in fact it is not. Considering what we now know about how BP handled the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that wouldn’t be surprising.

And one oil spill specialist isn’t taking ExxonMobil’s word. He says there’s crude in the lake, and he has the tests to prove it.

Scott Smith, CEO of the company Opflex Solutions, dropped a bombshell this week when he told a group of Mayflower residents that water samples tested by an independent lab show chemicals such as barium and methylene chloride — often found in tar-sands oil — in Lake Conway.

Many locals fish in Lake Conway and eat what they catch. Both barium and methylene chloride have been shown to cause health problems including cancer.

“Preliminary results show that the tar sands are not only in Lake Conway, but are moving beyond Lake Conway and toward the Arkansas River,” Smith told the group.

Smith’s company has created “reusable, highly buoyant, biodegradable open celled polyolefin foam” that soaks up oil. It was used in the BP oil spill in the Gulf and in subsequent spills around the world. He says he offered this technology to ExxonMobil, but the company refused to use it.

ExxonMobil and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) insist that the main body of Lake Conway remains free of the tar-sands oil. In a press release on Tuesday, the ADEQ said it takes samples twice a week at a total of 20 sites in the Cove and the main body of the lake.

But Smith says while the ADEQ and ExxonMobil test the lake’s surface and soil samples from the bottom of the lake, he is concerned about the water in between. The solvents in tar-sands oil don’t simply sink to the bottom of a lake, he says, but rather they float in the water column, especially when it rains, as it has over the past few weeks.

And if there is oil in Lake Conway, it will likely spread. “There’s a strong current that flows from the lake to the river,” Smith says.

If he is correct, the oil spill would certainly have more far-reaching consequences. The Arkansas River is a major recreation and fishing destination. It flows into to the Mississippi River and subsequently to the Gulf of Mexico.

ADEQ Director Teresa Marks says that the agency is “willing to review credible data from independent parties should that data be made available to ADEQ.” But that’s cold comfort to locals.

Genieve Long, who has lived on the banks of the Cove for 28 years, says she told Smith where to take samples because certain creeks that connect to the lake — and ultimately the Arkansas River — have flooded from torrential spring rains.

“I feel like there is a cover-up,” Long says. “I walk onto my front porch and I see the lake and I have seen the oil sheen that flows past.”

The 22 houses that were evacuated immediately after the rupture remain empty. Some families have had the option of returning but have not. Still, ExxonMobil announced in a news release Tuesday, “The majority of freestanding oil has been contained or cleaned up.” The company is now phasing into a “longer-term remediation phase.”

Long, who was never given the option to evacuate, worries about the long-term consequences of the spill. She says she fears the whole town is contaminated with tar-sands oil, considering workers have gone into Harp’s, the local grocery store, and restaurants wearing grimy hazmat suits.

“They won’t be here for the long haul,” Long says of ExxonMobil. “They are going to pack up and leave and the people are going to have to deal with the repercussions.”

Until the Pegasus pipeline ruptured on March 29, leaking an estimated 147,000 to 210,000 gallons of heavy crude oil into the town of Mayflower, Ark., few Arkansans knew it was even there.

In fact, thousands of miles of pipelines snake through the heart of the United States. Proponents insist that pipelines are the safest way to transport oil — safer than trucks or trains or tankers. Yet, in recent years, the Yellowstone River spill in Montana, the Kalamazoo River spill in Marshall, Mich., and now the Mayflower spill have alerted Americans to the dirty dangers that lurk underneath the country.

There are 175,000 miles of onshore and offshore “Hazardous Liquid” pipelines pumping petroleum and its byproducts across the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which oversees all pipelines. From 1990 to 2011, more than 110 million gallons of mostly crude oil and petroleum products spilled from these pipelines, many of which now carry chemicals that are much different than those for which they were designed.

Most of these spills go unreported by the press, but activists hope that the sight of black crude oozing through a subdivision of $200,000 brick homes in Mayflower, a town of 2,200 about 25 miles north of Little Rock, will spark the public’s ire, driving change on both the local and national levels.

More than 13 miles of the 858-mile Pegasus pipeline run through the Lake Maumelle watershed, the major water supply for Little Rock, the state capital, with a metro region of more than 700,000 people. If the Mayflower rupture had occurred near Lake Maumelle, the results could have been catastrophic, potentially poisoning the water supply of hospitals, restaurants, and households. The cleanup could have taken months or even years. The fallout would have cost millions.

“It would jeopardize the entire economy of central Arkansas that relies on the lake for clean, dependable water,” says Barry Haas, spokesperson for the grassroots group Citizens Protecting Maumelle Watershed.

Haas has sent a letter on behalf of his group to Rex Tillerson, chair and CEO of ExxonMobil, which owns Pegasus, asking the company to move the pipeline from the watershed. Central Arkansas Water, a water supply utility, also wants ExxonMobil to move the pipeline. The utility had expressed concerns about Pegasus even before the Mayflower spill.

This week, a new coalition called All Risk, No Reward launched to persuade President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to reject to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that will flow 1,179 miles from Canada through the Midwest. The coalition used the Mayflower incident as a central argument against Keystone. The group also called out Alberta Premier Alison Redford, who is visiting Washington this week from Canada, to promote the tar-sands project.

Pipelines — and the content they carry — have changed vastly since World War II. A network of pipes that once carried black gold to fuel this nation’s economy now carries large quantities of crude from Canada. Most of this type of oil isn’t even used in the United States, but rather exported to foreign countries.

The Pegasus pipeline, constructed in 1948, initially delivered light, conventional crude oil from Nederland, Texas, to the Patoka Oil Terminal Hub in Patoka, Ill. At some point, the petroleum began flowing in the opposite direction, and light crude oil switched to heavy oil. ExxonMobil has said that the pipeline did not carry Canadian tar-sands oil. On its corporate blog, a company spokesman described the pipeline’s content as “Wabasca heavy oil” which is “from Alberta near the area where there is oil sands production.” Environmentalists, however, argue that the crude is tar-sands oil.

A 2009 ExxonMobil press release announcing the completion of the Pegasus pipeline retrofit said that project would “enable the transportation of additional Canadian crude from the Midwest to Gulf Coast refineries.” It added that the pipeline had “operational enhancements, such as new leak detection technology.”

But the Mayflower spill highlights the danger of pipelines in this brave new world of oil. Aging pipelines like Pegasus now transport thicker, more corrosive oil than that for which they were originally designed. And watchdog groups say they do this with very little oversight from state or federal regulators.

Rita Beving,a consultant fortheTexas office ofPublic Citizen, a national nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, says that pipeline companies are in a race to land lucrative shipping contracts with Texas refineries.

“Why should pipeline companies apply for permits and go through tedious environmental impact statements [required for new pipelines],” she asks, “when you can repurpose an old pipeline with little, if any, environmental scrutiny from a state agency, and with little resistance from landowners who already have an existing line in the ground?”

The residents of Mayflower, Ark., can tell you why. While ExxonMobil claims the Pegasus pipeline was outfitted with 21st-century safety features, that’s cold comfort to those living near it.

“Any rupture of the pipeline within the Lake Maumelle watershed, even if discovered immediately and the valves shut off instantly, which is not what would happen in reality, risks 1.25 million gallons of this goo leaking out,” Haas says. “We cannot play Russian roulette with the public drinking water supply for 400,000 people. That’s simply unacceptable.”

Before last Friday, that’s likely as close as Mayflower residents got to the multinational oil and gas behemoth ExxonMobil. But after the Pegasus Pipeline burst last Friday, sending thousands of gallons of tar-sands oil into the Northwoods neighborhood, the company became omnipresent in this small town of 2,200 people.

The first thing you notice when driving into Mayflower is the stench. Travelers can smell the fumes from Interstate 40, which runs through the town. Within town limits, the smell is putrid: Imagine wet asphalt on a hot summer’s day — times 10,000. At the local Harp’s grocery, something less than half a mile from the spill, the stink makes your eyes water and your nose burn.

But the reek is only a hint at ExxonMobil’s presence here. Since thick black sludge first began oozing across backyards and into the streets, surprising many residents who say they didn’t even realize the pipeline was there, the company has instituted something like martial law.

Bank signs that once advertised interest rates and loan information now flash, “Thank you for your help and patience Mayflower,” along with a toll-free number residents can call to make financial claims to ExxonMobil. Company workers wearing logoed shirts roam throughout the town. Local police guard the entrance to the neighborhood where the spill happened. On Starlite Road, where oil flowed down the street last week, workers vacuum up oil in yards and steam-wash pavement.

The oil company has also taken over wildlife rescue from a local organization; independent rescuers report that they are being forced to leave private property by ExxonMobil enforcers. (Casualties so far include oil-covered ducks, snakes, and nutria.) Reporters who accompanied Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel on a tour of the spill on Wednesday were asked to leave by Exxon representatives. Even the state Department of Environmental Quality refers reporters to the Exxon downstream media line for information.

Earlier this week, ExxonMobil requested — and received — a temporary no-fly zone over the oil spill. A local newspaper reported that the only aircraft allowed in the area were those under the direction of Tom Suhrhoff, who according to LinkedIn is an aviation adviser at ExxonMobil. After a two-day prohibition, some media were allowed to fly over on Thursday.

Even the Mayflower High School’s cafeteria was ExxonMobil turf on Tuesday night when the company held a meeting for residents in the affected neighborhood, where 22 homes remain evacuated. Reporters were barred from that event, but an activist who slipped in said the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Health, and the county judge all spoke along with ExxonMobil officials.

Mayflower residents should get used to their new reality, says Ernest DelBuono, a senior vice president and Crisis Practice Chair at LEVICK, a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C. “Exxon is going to do what they have to do clean it up,” DelBuono says. “They will be judged in courts on how quickly and efficiently they cleaned it up.”

But DelBuono, a former Coast Guard official who was in charge of communications for the Exxon Valdez cleanup, says that usually there is a keen federal presence in such spills. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he says, BP may have been running the show, but there was an orchestrated effort to keep the company out of public briefings. Those were handled by federal government officials from various agencies.

The BP disaster was a different beast because it involved various states and overlapping jurisdictions. And the Mayflower spill is much smaller. But DelBuono says that a prominent federal and state presence is still needed in these crises. And while Exxon spends its time reassuring residents that cleanup is going according to plan, it’s very clear that life is far from normal.

The 65-year-old Pegasus Pipeline ruptured in the Northwoods neighborhood, just off the town’s main highway, which is lined with dollar stores and a Sonic drive-in. The thick tar-sands oil ran into creeks and tributaries throughout the area. ExxonMobil officials have repeatedly said that they prevented any runoff into Lake Conway, a popular fishing and recreation spot. The company reports that it has placed barriers and 3,600 feet of boom around the lake. Aerial photos, however, show oil in marshes near the lake, and another photo shows dead vegetation in the lake.

And then there’s that stench. Exxon sent a mailer to Mayflower residents stating, in part, “Although you may smell an odor, current air quality readings are below levels likely to cause health effects with the exception of the clean-up areas where the emergency responders are directly working.”

It’s unclear what exactly is in these fumes, but previous tar-sands leaks include toxic natural gas liquids and other petrochemical diluents. And the fumes appear to be seriously affecting people.

Eight school children went home sick on Monday from Mayflower schools. Ed Barham, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Health, said that air monitors are now in and around the school. “There were not levels of benzene that would be harmful,” Barham said of the children’s illnesses. “We don’t have evidence that they were sick because of the oil.”

Tracy Wilson, a resident of nearby Conway, Ark., says that her parents, who are in their 60s and have health issues, live about a mile away from the site. Both have been getting sicker since Sunday, she says, with upset stomachs, headaches, and burning noses. She spent all day Wednesday calling agencies, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, but continued to get “the runaround.”

“People who live outside that neighborhood [on the fringes of the evacuation zone] have no clue what is going on,” Wilson says. “I want to know from the health department what they should be treated for if they go to a doctor.”

Wilson also called the ExxonMobil claims office on Wednesday. She said a company representative returned her call on late Wednesday offering to put her parents in a hotel room and reimburse them for any medical expenses. But Wilson said she wondered what strings were attached to the offer. Still, on Thursday, her parents accepted a company-sponsored hotel room and food allowance.

ExxonMobil reported Thursday in its daily email release to reporters that 640 workers are responding to the cleanup along with local, state, and federal officials. The company reports that 12,000 barrels of oil and water were recovered in the first few days of the spill. More than half of the impacted soil has been removed from six yards. It’s unclear when the evacuated families will be able to return to their homes.

The spill comes at a critical moment. Environmental groups are pushing against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The pipeline needs the Obama administration’s approval to finalize its permitting. Keystone Blockaders are currently in Mayflower documenting the oil spill.

They aren’t the only ones. Attorney General McDaniel has demanded that ExxonMobil produce investigative reports, inspection reports, and other information connected to pipeline rupture and oil spill by April 10.

“The people of Arkansas deserve a full explanation from Exxon about how this incident occurred and the extent of damages to private property and to our state’s natural resources,” McDaniel said. “My office is determined to get that explanation through our investigation because, at the moment, we still have many more questions than we do answers.”

UPDATE: McDaniel reported Friday morning that there is oil in Lake Conway despite ExxonMobil’s assurances to the contrary. “Great efforts have been taken to limit the spread of the oil to only one area of Lake Conway, which is referred to as the Cove, but the Cove and Lake Conway are hydrologically connected and are therefore one body of water,” Aaron Sadler, spokesman for McDaniel, told Grist. Meanwhile, access to the site continues to be tightly policed. According to InsideClimate, ExxonMobil threatened reporter Lisa Song with arrest on Wednesday when she entered the command center looking for government officials.

]]>arkansas-oil-spill-cleanup-hazard-workers-neighborhood-suburbs-smallarkansas-oil-spill-cleanup-hazard-workers-neighborhood-suburbs-smallSome farmers’ markets aren’t as local as you thinkhttp://grist.org/article/local2/
http://grist.org/article/local2/#respondFri, 22 Sep 2006 00:33:43 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/local2/]]>Kathy Webb stands in front of a group of 20 people in the dining room of her Asian restaurant, talking about locally grown food. As she describes how nearly all the ingredients in the five-course dinner she’s about to serve — from the tomatoes and herbs in the salad to the berries in the dessert — are from Arkansas, she educates her listeners while whetting their appetites.

Webb, a newly elected state legislator and owner of Lilly’s Dim Sum, Then Some in Little Rock, says a connection to food is something Americans have lacked over the last several decades. “When you know who has picked your peach, when you know the story about that peach, you will appreciate it and have a connection to that peach,” Webb says. “That’s important. We don’t have that connection to food anymore, but we need to, and we need to know where our food comes from.”

So, you from around here?

Photo: iStockphoto

It’s people like Webb who have begun to ask whether the produce they buy at the Little Rock farmers’ market is serving that purpose. That’s because the market, unlike many in the U.S., allows vendors who don’t grow their own produce to sell products — most of which come from outside the state. And that doesn’t sit well with local farmers.

This summer, farmers who rent stalls twice a week at the downtown market have questioned why “peddlers” — as the farmers call them — are allowed to sell the same produce they do: tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons. The peddlers’ items are cheaper and come from boxes marked as originating in Georgia, California, Mexico, and points in between, not rural Arkansas. Farmers who spend hours babying their crops believe this is misleading to consumers who think they are supporting local farmers and stimulating the local economy by shopping at the market.

Several farmers — including Christian Shuffield, who grows organic and biodynamic specialty greens and legumes, and Jody Hardin, a well-known Arkansas farmer and a fixture at the market — are tired of the unfair playing field. “Is this a farmers’ market or a global bazaar?” Hardin asks. “Peddlers are lying, saying they have gardens. That is irritating. They don’t put any money into growing their product.”

Shuffield agrees. “The commercial vendors don’t have overhead like diesel or labor,” he says. “It’s important to buy locally for the farmers’ benefit.”

Both say it is hard to educate people to buy locally when consumers see imported produce at a farmers’ market, just as they do on the grocery store shelf. So they approached Shannon Light, the market’s manager, to discuss changes. Since the 15,000-square-foot pavilion that hosts the market is so vast, Light responded by moving Arkansas farmers to one end, peddlers to the other. Now Arkansas farmers have signs promoting their Arkansas produce.

But the farmers say this isn’t enough. And they worry that some peddlers may still be passing themselves off as local farmers because they sell a few items grown in-state, even though many of their wares come from fsrther afield. Light admits she doesn’t know how many of the 200 registered vendors are actually Arkansas farmers; she doesn’t “exactly divide them that way,” she says. And she doesn’t seem to care much about the distinction. She says there is room for everyone in what she describes as “the special event I am having … like a little circus.” Indeed, the market under her management is more akin to a yuppie street fair featuring mimes and bongo players than a down-home event.

“Some people don’t care about buying local, they just want fresh,” Light says. “[The peddlers] wouldn’t be bringing watermelons in May if it wasn’t selling. It’s profitable and something that people want. If you are dipping strawberries and you can get big and beautiful ones from California while buying your winter squash, you should go ahead and get them for your party on Tuesday.”

But Arkansas farmers raise strawberries, too, says Hardin, and he has seen his profit cut on seasonal produce because peddlers sell it a week before he does. “As farmers, we need a pent-up demand for a product,” he says. “We need people anxious to get it when it comes in season. We can’t sell as much because the peddlers are competing. Other farmers will bring in California strawberries, and it kills the demand.”

Not From My Back Yard

Should a farmers’ market offer only locally grown items? Many people who care about good food and a healthy environment say yes, especially as concerns mount about fuel costs and food miles, or the distance food travels before it reaches your mouth.

A farmers’ market conjures up images of mom-and-pop operations that load up the pickup truck with homegrown squash, tomatoes, and eggplants and deliver them to the city for urbanites to buy without a middleman. While local doesn’t necessarily mean organic, it does mean fresh, not transported thousands of miles before reaching its buyer. According to California-based Local Harvest, a national directory of farms and farmers’ markets, most produce in the U.S. is picked four to seven days before it is placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before it is sold. It takes even longer if the produce comes from outside the country.

“What is happening in Arkansas would never happen in California,” says Guillermo Payet, president of Local Harvest. California has a certification program for farmers’ markets, which allows only in-state growers. The United Kingdom has a similar program. But in Arkansas, as in many other states, each local community polices itself.

Some never strayed from strict rules. The market in Fayetteville, Ark., which began in 1974, allows only farmers who live and grow within a four-county area to sell. Even artisans who sell crafts in the market must follow the same rules. The same type of guidelines apply to the market in Boulder, Colo. The market in Portland, Ore., after which the Little Rock market modeled itself, allows products from throughout the state as well as neighboring Washington, but makes few other exceptions.

The Little Rock market began the same year as its counterpart in Fayetteville, in a downtown parking garage. Then, the farmers governed themselves and “enforced a producer-only rule and allowed only the sale of Arkansas-grown produce,” according to a 1999 USDA review of the market.

In 1996, the operation moved to a wood-and-steel pavilion in the heart of the $300 million revitalized and tourist-driven River Market District near the William J. Clinton Presidential Museum and Park. At that point, the rules were relaxed to include out-of-season produce and exotics such as pineapples and avocados that cannot be grown in Arkansas. As the USDA review noted, “consumer favorites such as melons, peaches, greens, and tomatoes from outside the state may be sold at the market when locally unavailable.”

A Matter of Scale

Between 1994 and 2004, the number of farmers’ markets in the U.S. increased 111 percent, from 1,755 to 3,706, according to the USDA. Arkansas has almost 50 markets. Across the country, those figures are expected to keep rising over the next decade.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, says farmers’ markets could be the only viable alternative in a world forced to be less dependent on oil. “We are going to have huge problems feeding ourselves as the world slips into a permanent global energy crisis,” he says. “Industrial-style agriculture, featuring giant farms and heavy applications of oil-and-gas-based soil ‘inputs’ and massive use of diesel fuel, is going to fail — and sooner rather than later. We are going to have to grow much more of our food locally, and on a smaller, finer scale. The people who are doing that now must be supported. Your lives will depend on them a few years from now.”

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, also predicts a throwback to the 1940s, when people tended victory gardens in their backyards. “If we are going to stabilize the climate and have an adequate food supply, we are going to have to go back to the way it was,” he says. “That means also eating seasonal.”

Arkansas, with its vast farmland and mild seasons, is in a prime spot to make this happen. Agriculture is the state’s leading industry, thanks mostly to major crops such as rice, soybeans, and cotton. While it has its share of factory farms and vegetable producers, including the mammoth Riceland Rice, the state is also home to thousands of small farmers who want to make a living — however modest — by doing what they love.

According to the USDA, those who benefit from farmers’ markets are small farmers with less than $250,000 in annual gross receipts who work and manage their own operations. Local Harvest points out that only 18 cents of every dollar from sales at large supermarkets go to the grower, with the balance going to various unnecessary middlemen.

Hardin would like to see Little Rock’s city board of directors bar out-of-state produce from the farmers’ market. He says that because of the controversy over who’s permitted to sell at the market, more farmers are looking for alternative venues. That leaves only a small core to fight the peddlers.

While the city is likely to leave the resolution of this issue to those who manage the market, farmers might get help from the state. Richard Bell, secretary of the recently created Arkansas Department of Agriculture, says there is a need to closely examine farmers’ markets. He suggests that some sort of future legislation could address the issues that worry farmers like Hardin.

“My goal is to increase the amount of produce that is coming from small Arkansas farms,” Bell says. “A good part of a farmers’ market is a good economic development plan. It is a way of providing an amenity to people in your community, and I do think we need some more formalized guidelines to make that work.”

]]>http://grist.org/article/local2/feed/0market-produce.jpgHow poultry producers are ravaging the rural Southhttp://grist.org/article/parker1/
http://grist.org/article/parker1/#commentsWed, 22 Feb 2006 06:51:33 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/parker1/]]>A person driving through the South might notice the chicken houses dotting the hills and flatlands. He might marvel at the larger ones, as long as a football field. He might react to their gagging stench for a moment, and then forget as he travels on. But those who live near the structures — stuffed with as many as 25,000 chickens each — combat the odor and health hazards daily.

Not yer pappy’s chicken coop.

Photo: USDA.

“There’s a horrible odor, a stench, and I have flies and rodents digging in, trying to get into my house,” says Bernadine Edwards, whose 39-acre farm near Owensboro, Ky., is surrounded by 108 chicken houses within a two-mile radius. “It is unbelievable.”

The 65-year-old school bus driver, who recently bought a purifier to help her breathe easier in her home, says the value of her property has plummeted since the chicken houses arrived in the early 1990s. “I’m too old to start over,” she says. “I can’t afford to. My house is paid for.”

Edwards is not alone. Over the last 15 years, the country has seen a boom in chicken farming. Today, the industry is serving a cocktail of injustice and pollution to rural residents, and most of them aren’t in a position to fight back.

Growing Pains

Since the early 1990s, observers say, thousands of chicken houses have cropped up across the South as consumer demand for poultry has grown. Today, the U.S. is the world’s poultry leader, with production of broilers, turkeys, and eggs valued at $29 billion in 2004, according to the National Chicken Council. Broilers — chickens raised for meat — generated $22 billion of that. The leading broiler production states in 2004 were Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas, which is home to the world’s largest poultry producer, Tyson Foods.

Like chemical companies and industrial hog farmers, poultry producers don’t tend to place these concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs, in ritzy neighborhoods beside multimillion dollar McMansions. Instead, chicken houses commandeer spacious rural areas, where local residents need the income and their neighbors won’t speak out against them — or are unaware of the factories’ environmental and health consequences.

“These companies seek rural areas where unemployment, or underemployment, is high and people are desperate for ways to stay on the farm,” says Aloma Dew, a Sierra Club organizer in Kentucky. “They assume that poor, country people will not organize or speak up, and that they will be ignorant of the impacts on their health and quality of life.”

The companies provide local growers, who work under contract, with chicks, feed, medicine, and transportation. Growers take care of the rest, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction, maintenance, and labor costs. When the company requires upgrades, the costs fall to the growers. The massive amounts of manure, too, are their responsibility. (In Arkansas alone, chicken farms produce an amount of waste each day equal to that produced by 8 million people.) Payment is results-oriented, based on measures like total weight gain of the flock. It’s a system, says the United Food and Commercial Workers, that leaves 71 percent of growers earning below poverty-level wages.

A far cry from free range.

Photo: USDA.

If growers protest, companies can cancel their contracts, leaving farmers responsible for incurred debt, says Laura Klauke, director of contract agriculture reform at the North Carolina-based Rural Advancement Foundation International. And that debt can be substantial: since banks in the region will more readily loan money for poultry houses than other types of agriculture, Klauke says, some farmers put everything on the line, mortgaging their property to make a living this way.

“If those contracts are canceled — and they can be if the farmer doesn’t do what the industry wants — then that farmer could literally be homeless,” said Klauke. “I know farmers who have been in that situation.” (Industry representatives did not respond to requests for comments on this or any of the concerns expressed in this story.)

Pecks and Effects

More frightening than the economic balancing act may be the health and environmental hazards posed by chicken farms, from the arsenic, ammonia, and other chemicals found in feed and manure to threats from diseased animals. While traditional farming can carry similar risks, CAFOs are especially hazardous because of the tight confinement that defines them. “The fact is, you put hundreds of animals in a very small area, that creates problems that would not exist if these animals were distributed across the countryside,” says Barclay Rogers, who successfully litigated a pollution case against Tyson in Kentucky in 2003.

Rogers says the industry grew rapidly with little regulatory constraint, and has been “riding roughshod” over land and people. While CAFOs must follow federal environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, he says, many growers try to “duck and weave” regulations. “The industry may stand up and say we are over-regulating, and that we have all of these permits, but the practical aspect is that they have devised many ways to avert pollution controls,” said Rogers. “That’s why we are seeing the fouling of water and air. We just now are coming to grips with these consequences, as people are catching up and realizing what has happened to them.”

Last year, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson (D) filed suit against Tyson, Cargill, and several other poultry companies, seeking to stop water pollution caused in his state by soiled chicken litter dumped in Arkansas. Polluted runoff, also known as non-point source pollution, is the biggest remaining water pollution problem in the U.S., according to the EPA, which cites agriculture as the largest source of such pollution. Edmondson described the problem as “an economic development issue, an agricultural issue, and a quality-of-life issue.” Not to be outdone, Arkansas Attorney General Mike Beebe (D) — who is running for governor — countered in November by suing the state of Oklahoma directly, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to prohibit Oklahoma from forcing his state’s poultry farmers to adhere to the stricter standards. Both cases are still pending.

This messy interstate situation is just one indication of the many unknowns at stake. “Some of the [environmental] consequences of these CAFOs are just not clear,” said Van Brahana, a geologist at the University of Arkansas who studies groundwater. “What we do know is when you have a lot of organisms living in close conditions and you have a buildup of chemicals, you might get a cause-and-effect relationship. The scary thing is we just don’t know right now.”

The effects on those who work directly with the animals are clearer. “In rural America, the poultry companies can get workers for a song, and the workers are so grateful to get the jobs,” says Jackie Nowell of the United Food and Commercial Workers. These workers — usually poor, and often African American or Hispanic — “are exposed to feces [and] any disease the chicken has,” Nowell says. “There are also horrible levels of dust and dander inside these houses.”

Nowell adds that researchers in the region are currently exploring the possible crossover of various viruses from poultry to humans, like avian flu. “That’s a real concern. These workers and people who live near these houses will be on ground zero of an outbreak.”

Flies cluster around a pile of carcasses in Missouri.

Photo: USDA.

Workers in poultry processing plants also face serious dangers from machinery, carpal tunnel syndrome, and health hazards such as contaminated microorganisms and dust. “There are huge health and safety violations in every plant,” says Jennifer Rosenbaum, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. In 2004, for example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued citations to Tyson for alleged violations after an employee was asphyxiated when he inhaled hydrogen sulfide, a gas created by decaying organic matter. OSHA fined the company $436,000.

Poultry companies “hire relatively low-income people, immigrants who have less of an understanding of rights and health issues,” Rosenbaum says. Simply put, she says, the companies are hurting the South’s small towns while they fatten their own wallets.

Chicken Fight

Katie Tillinghast lives in rural northwest Arkansas. In early January, she received a call from a neighbor who told her he planned to put three large turkey houses on his property, 200 yards away. Tillinghast wants to stop the project, but the only plausible choice would be to buy her neighbor out at $3,000 an acre — and he owns 73 acres. She can’t afford that, and knows it’s highly unlikely that a rich buyer will step in to help.

You’ll never look at chicken nuggets the same way again.

Photo: USDA.

Like other states, Arkansas does not yet have a law to protect residents from these operations, though several states have considered such legislation. So Tillinghast can’t do much but worry — about her drinking water, about avian flu, about noise and light pollution, about air quality. “I agree someone should be able to do what they want to do on their land,” Tillinghast says. “But I don’t think you should be able to do something that hurts your neighbors.”

Many others agree with her, but local dynamics can make it hard for activists to issue a battle cry. “Often these plants are the only major industry in town,” says SPLC’s Rosenbaum. “Everyone goes to church together or went to high school together. Everyone knows everyone, and it’s hard to fight that.”

Groups like the Sierra Club have fought the poultry industry for many years, but only recently have they begun to collaborate with people on the ground. In 2004, a group of growers, workers, and environmental, public-health, religious, and social-justice organizations created the National Poultry Justice Alliance.

The idea came from the Glenmary Commission on Justice in Ohio, a group of Catholic brothers and priests who have worked in the South since 1939. Marcus Keyes, the commission’s director, says he was inspired by a statement from the Catholic Bishops of the South in 2000 about workers’ rights. “These are moral issues — the rights of workers, conditions of workers, pay and benefits,” said Keyes. “These are human rights issues, and environmental [issues, but] in the end they are all moral issues.” The group’s members are working to strengthen the alliance before launching a major campaign.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit may come to trial in early April that could up the ante. While previous suits have dealt with pollution and workers’ rights, this one tackles the issue of health effects on residents. In 2003, a group of citizens from Prairie Grove, Ark., a town of 2,500, filed a lawsuit against several poultry producers. Citing a connection between the community’s high cancer rates and arsenic contamination from chicken litter spread as fertilizer, they are seeking damages from the companies that own the birds (not, it should be noted, from the local growers). Their lawyers say cancer rates in the small town are 50 times higher than the national average.

The Prairie Grove effort has grown to include about 100 plaintiffs in multiple suits, each of which will be tried separately. Supporters say that legal action may be the only way to bring these issues to light and hold the industry to higher standards. If the court rules in Prairie Grove’s favor, the decision could provide ground for others to stand on. Until then, the only ones winning in this despair-filled industry are the mammoth corporations.

You have to want to get to Nacogdoches, a Texas town that’s not on the way to anywhere. This eastern outpost, nearly 150 miles from Houston, is the oldest town in the state, with enough lore to fill volumes. It’s the site where, in the 1700s, the legendary Father Margil struck a rock twice during a drought and water flowed. In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead. And in late July, the town served as the perfect out-of-the-way location to host a congressional hearing on the National Environmental Policy Act.

That landmark legislation, signed by President Nixon in 1970, requires federal agencies to study and disclose the environmental effects of major projects on public land. It also stipulates that the decision-making process for such projects must include the opportunity for public comment. The three-page law enshrines caution.

But lately, NEPA has come under fire. In April, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Resources, created a congressional “task force on improving” the act. Through a series of six regional hearings, the task force is reaching across America to hear comments before issuing a report in the fall.

But while NEPA strives to bring every concerned party to the table, observers say these hearings do not. They are being held in obscure locations, at odd times, and with little advance warning. Witnesses are handpicked, with the lineup revealed on the task force’s website only days before each event, a move some critics see as an attempt to stifle debate.

“They have decided to have a birthday party where they invite the guests they want,” says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “They want to hear what they want to hear.”

Participants say the first session, held in Spokane, Wash., in April, yielded support for the act. The Earth Day-weekend event, publicized locally by community groups, drew 175 people, many wearing stickers that read, “I Support NEPA: Democracy in Action.” Task-force member Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), who led the hearing with task-force chair Rep. Cathy McMorris (R-Wash.), says he thinks some of his colleagues were shocked by the results. “I think what I observed in Spokane, much to [Pombo’s] surprise, was an overwhelming support by the American public that their government fairly looks at their actions,” says Inslee.

Rep. Cathy McMorris is listening.

Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

According to Inslee, Pope, and others, the strategy shifted after Spokane. The next hearing’s venue was changed several times before it was held in Lakeside, Ariz., on June 18. The Nacogdoches hearing was also moved, from Houston; and an early-August hearing, the most recent, was moved from Albuquerque to Rio Rancho, N.M. — and held at 10 a.m. on a Monday.

Representatives from the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity were invited to testify in Arizona, but only a few days prior to the hearing; they were given one day to prepare and submit their comments. The event also conflicted with a long-planned dam-decommissioning celebration deemed a NEPA victory. “Given the impossible deadline … both groups had to decline, but offered written testimony a few days later for the record,” says Neha Bhatt, a Sierra Club representative in Washington, D.C.

As a result, no environmentalists testified in Arizona. Who did speak? Representatives of the forestry, cattle, construction, mining, and energy industries. Now, says Bhatt, “The task-force website makes a point to say we were invited to testify, but didn’t. They don’t give the public access to [our written testimony]. It’s frustrating.” She adds that the Sierra Club asked to testify at the hearing in Nacogdoches, but was not invited.

Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), the task force’s ranking member, didn’t attend the Texas hearing either. He said he received only two weeks’ notice. Like most politicians in Washington, his schedule is planned months in advance, and he had commitments in his home state. “It’s helpful to have [the hearings] in communities out in the country,” Udall says, “but the task force needs to be better at publicizing where they will be and including all people who have a stake in this issue.”

The Nacogdoches hearing was hosted by McMorris and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) in a concert hall at Stephen F. Austin State University. After an invocation asking God for protection for Gohmert and his family, and the singing of the national anthem, the invited witnesses got down to business in front of an audience of about 70 people. (Members of the public, while welcome to attend the hearings, can submit only written comments.)

The panel of witnesses consisted of seven industry representatives and two environmentalists: Larry Shelton, a trustee from the Texas Committee on Natural Resources, and Sandra Nichols, a staff attorney with WildLaw in Montgomery, Ala. Shelton said NEPA did not need to be changed. But Nichols said “real solutions” were needed to make the law more effective. She added that environmental groups were urged by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) “to come out of the trenches” and meet halfway. That’s what she hoped to accomplish at the hearing, she said.

Representatives for the oil, mining, and timber industries spoke about economic interests and the interference caused by too many regulations. As Victor Carrillo, the state’s railroad commissioner, put it, “When the federal government does pass a law or regulation, it should be simple, clear, understandable, limited in scope, reasonable, practical, and pass the commonsense test.”

Common sense — and the notion that NEPA lacks it — was the theme here, along with the general agreement that too much environmental assessment and too many stakeholders result in lawsuits and red tape. “NEPA doesn’t sit on a pedestal that can’t be touched,” Gohmert said.

When asked about the selection of witnesses, McMorris said the NEPA hearings are intended to offer a better understanding of the 35-year-old law and its economic impacts. “We don’t need to have 10 people say nothing needs to be improved,” she said. “We want to hear from the people who have problems with NEPA.” That kind of comment disturbs Inslee. “Right before [Pombo] created this task force, right out of the gate, the chairman tried to strip NEPA and reduce it in the energy bill,” he says. “That diminishes the effectiveness of this task force. It has not been very effective at getting a broad perspective of Americans. It’s a dud in that regard.”

Many people believe NEPA is sound legislation. Oliver Houck, who directs the environmental-law program at Tulane University’s law school, cannot imagine what the task force’s fuss is about. “NEPA [instituted] one very simple, modest device,” says Houck. “It didn’t shut down anything, didn’t set up a review board. It just required an environmental impact statement. A more modest requirement would be hard to imagine.”

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.), a well-known conservationist who has received accolades from several environmental groups, sits on the Resources Committee with Pombo but is not a task-force member. While he believes NEPA’s application may need to be more logical — a conclusion also reached by a NEPA “modernization” task force created in 2002 by the White House Council on Environmental Quality — he says the law allows for innovation, a crucial component as the world faces global warming. With innovation comes ingenuity and intellect, he adds: “NEPA expands those characteristics. If you shut down NEPA, you lose that.”

Some environmental advocates predict the real battle will begin next year, when NEPA-weakening legislation will almost certainly be introduced. If the act is gutted, they say, it might mean the very result Pombo seeks to avoid: more lawsuits. “When we aren’t listened to by the government, we have the right to legally challenge,” says Bianca Encinias of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. “Our communities have a right to know, and a right to participate.”